It’s a hot summer night, turned morning in
New York City. A young sailor, Alex Winkler (Bill Williams), wakes up in a
newsstand, not sure how he got there or why there is $1400 in cash in his
pocket. A radio specialist scheduled to leave on a bus at six am for duty in
Norfolk, Virginia; he is carried along the sidewalk by the bustling crowd and
ends up in a dance hall. There he sees taxi dancer June Goffe (Susan Hayward)
getting rid of Edward Honig (Steven Geray), a customer obsessed by her.

After a few dances, June starts feeling
sympathetic for Alex, who is naïve and innocent. June invites him back to her
place for a sandwich. There Alex confesses to June that, although he had an
alcohol-induced blackout, he must have stolen the $1,400 from Edna Bartelli
(Lola Lane) after her brother, Val (Joseph Calleia), fleeced him in a card game
and she plied him with drinks.

June invites customer and sailor Alex Winkler (Bill Williams) back to her apartment.

Alex wants to return the money and persuades
June to accompany him to Edna's apartment at 51st and Lexington. (June has a
brother in the service and she’s a native of Norfolk.) There Alex discovers
Edna's strangled body in the living room. June tries to reassure Alex of his
innocence, but he is convinced it’s only a matter of time before the police
arrest him.

June chooses to help Alex and suggests that
they think like the killer in order to deduce his whereabouts. They stop at the
corner soda fountain to get a drink, but decide they’re not really thirsty
after all. June asks the soda jerk if there had been anyone else like them
recently. He tells her that a blonde with a limp left the counter in a rush and
took a taxi. Posing as the blonde's sister, June finds the cabbie who took her and
he takes her to the blonde's destination.

While June questions Helen Robinson (Osa
Massen), the blonde, about her activities at 51st and Lexington, Alex pursues a
distraught man (Roman Bohnen) in a taxi cab. Alex soon learns that the man
raced off because his cat (and sadly best friend) was choking and the man had
gone to the pet store for help, but he’s too late. Alex orders his cab back to
Edna's. Although June concludes that Helen knows nothing about Edna, Helen
discusses Edna's murder with her tense husband, Jerry (Phil Warren), after June
leaves.

Helen Robinson (Osa Massen) is questioned by June.

Back at Edna's apartment, June finds Alex
there with his sympathetic cab driver, Gus Hoffman (Paul Lukas). Gus tries to
convince Alex to forget about Edna, but June insists that Alex be cleared of
all suspicion by the time he catches his bus.

Soon after the trio discovers a stack of love
letters that Edna used for blackmailing purposes, a gun-wielding woman, Mrs.
Nan Raymond (Constance Worth), sneaks into the apartment. Nan grabs Edna's
letters and the money, but drops them as she is confronted by Gus.

Gus notices that there is a man watching the
apartment. In an attempt to draw him out, June and Gus leave to see if he
follows, which he does, hailing a cab to follow them. Meanwhile, Alex then calls
Lester Brady (Jerome Cowan), a theatrical producer whose bounced check to Edna
they also found, and makes an appointment with him. Nan, meanwhile, goes to see
Brady, also her lover, and tells him about Edna, who was blackmailing her over
their affair.

June with Gus Hoffman (Paul Lukas), the cab driver in Deadline at Dawn.

Hoping to retrieve the incriminating letters,
Nan and Lester then inform Val Bartelli, Edna's gangster brother, about her
demise. When Alex arrives at Lester's, Val accuses him of killing Edna and
knocks him out after he counter punches Lester. Reluctantly, Val agrees to
return Alex to Edna's with Lester, who tells Nan to go home to her husband.

Meanwhile, Gus has stopped the cab and
accosted the man, who turns out to be Honig, who is what they now call stalking
June.

At Edna’s, Val, unable to control his rage,
starts to beat up Alex but is stopped by Gus, when he and June return. They are
momentarily interrupted when drunken athlete Babe Dooley (Joe Sawyer) stands
out on the sidewalk and yells for Edna to give him a bottle of liquor. The
police, whose station is across the street from Edna’s, placate the Babe, by
sending an officer up to her apartment to get a bottle for him. Val gives the
officer one and he leaves. After Gus convinces Val that Alex is guiltless,
everyone heads over to a nightclub, where Edna's ex-husband, blind pianist
Sleepy Parsons (Marvin Miller), is performing.

While they’re out, Babe, who breaks his
bottle, heads back to Edna’s to get another one. There he discovers her body,
which Val had moved into the bedroom. Babe calls out the window for the police.

Sleepy, who had been to see Edna to collect
the $1400 minutes before her death, acts nervously around her scent, which June
has managed to spill all over her dress. Sleepy’s nervousness causes Val to
explode with accusation. Sleepy, who has a weak heart, drops dead, which attracts
the police and the entire group is brought in for questioning.

After an initial interrogation, the police zero
in on Alex, who admits to Lt. Kane (Jospeh Crehan) that he might have murdered
Edna during his blackout. But the police are startled when Jerry Thompson fully
confesses to the crime. Lt. Kane though easily unravels Jerry's confession and
they hone in on Helen.

Just then, Gus finally admits that he killed
Edna because she was having an affair with Jerry, his son-in-law, and wanted to
save his daughter's marriage now that they had a baby. Gus had tried to chase
Alex away from the scene, but when he couldn’t do that, had tried to prove his
innocence. On his way out, Gus tells June to follow Alex to Norfolk and she
agrees.

A happy ending for Alex and June. She agrees to follow him back to Norfolk.

This is not a great film noir plot, filled
with false leads and coincidences without which the plot would not have been
resolved. All the investigative work has been for naught, as it was Gus’ guilt
for getting Alex arrested, not for committing the murder itself, that results in
his confession.

Deadline at Dawn represents the one and only
film Howard Clurman would ever direct and perhaps that’s for the best if this
film was an example of his work. Clurman did have a very successful career on
Broadway. In 1931, Clurman was one of the three founders, along with Cheryl
Crawford and Lee Strasberg of the Group Theatre in New York City. He would
direct and produce plays for the Group until 1941 and continued to work on
Broadway until 1966.

Susan Hayward, the star of the film, does as
much as she can with the script. In my opinion, Bill Williams, who had been
working in films since 1933’s King Kong, overplays the naivety of Winkle. And I
get the distinct impression that a lot of the misleading plot direction was an
effort to pad out Woolrich’s original novella to feature length, though I don’t
have any firsthand experience with the book. A bright spot of the film is the
cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca, which looks great, so while the film does
nothing for the brain, it is still a treat for the eyes.

There are several other film noirs I would
recommend over this one. Deadline at Dawn might be forgettable with the exception
of its connection to Washington’s investigation of Communist activities in
Hollywood. The year after this film’s release, producer Adrian Scott was called
before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). He refused to
testify and was sentenced to jail time. Known as one of the Hollywood Ten,
Scott was subsequently blacklisted and unable to work in Hollywood. Clifford
Odets, the screenwriter, was called before the HUAC in 1952, but is considered
to have cooperated with the committee, saving himself from being blacklisted
but not from torment.Deadline at Dawn is available for viewing at Warner Archive Instant: